I don’t normally play with form poems, but sometimes, like in the middle of April when you’re trying to knock out a poem a day, you just gotta. And so, mid April in 2009, I wrote this shadorma. A shadorma is a six-line poem with with a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5, this particular one has twelve lines, repeating the syllable count. The poem was based on a little purple laptop toy my son has, which has a game in which you have to move the mouse over to catch the raining letters. It was just one of the many toys that, if you forgot to turn them off, would start talking by itself in the middle of the night, or when someone walked by heavy enough to cause a vibration, or, in the case of a puzzle that made animal noises when you put the pieces in, if the sun went down and shadows covered empty spaces. Always unnerving, especially in the pitch black, when one’s head is addled by sleep and just wants to take a pee, or get a warm drink and a Tylenol PM.

Oh yes, I was quite proud of my little shadorma. I submitted it all over the place for two years, and no one wanted it. It wasn’t until I sent it to GwI, and editor Dawn Corrigan pointed out that my syllable count was off. Now, Dawn hadn’t heard of a shadorma before I sent this to her. She took the time to Google it, count my syllables, and email me back to point out my mistake, giving me the opportunity to either rewrite it with the correct syllable count, or take the shadorma label off.

I chose to rewrite and, I think, improve the whole thing. The result is what you’ll find on the GwI website. Girls with Insurance is a quality online journal, in great part to the skills of the editors, who really care about what they put out. Read it, submit to it. Enjoy it.